UCSD Guardian Sports, April 10, 1989
BACKSTORY: As a sports fanatic about baseball and pro football (especially the Padres and Chargers), I lobbied the Sports editors for column inches as a guest commentator during several baseball and football seasons. If you look at the graphic, note the byline as “Advertising Designer.”
“When the great scorer comes, to mark against your name, he writes not that you won or lost, but how you played the game. “ – Grantland Rice
We can certainly thank myth makers like Grantland Rice and Ford Frick for this equation: man who plays baseball = hero. Sportswriters have passed on the myth from Ruth to DiMaggio to Musial to Mantle to Banks to Garvey to Carter.
Over the years, athletes became role models -- to be fair, a burden many didn’t seek or particularly relish.
One of the most ludicrous myths was the image of Babe Ruth as a lovable lug who hit home runs for sick little boys in hospitals. Ruth did make a few sick calls, but he spent most of his time chasing whores and boozing. In the arena of consumption, he was the real “refrigerator.”
Legend has it that on a train ride from New York to Boston, in view of a contingent of writers covering the Yankees that included future commissioner Ford Frick, Ruth chased one of his tramps down the center aisle, both of them buck nekkid. The writers looked at each other with knowing winks -- there was one incident that would never see newsprint.
These are the men that preserved in print the legacy of the game.
How the hero/ballplayer merger came about is unclear … or why. At the turn of the century, the image of the ballplayer was rather seedy. It was that of a streetwise brawler – Runyonesque, distinctly lowbrow. A boozy vulgarian with the same social standing as a carney act. A low paid thug with a nickname like “Alibi Ike.”
Not exactly the stuff of popular fiction for young boys.
In the 1920s and 30s, baseball’s popularity grew -- it became the first professional sport with a nationwide following. As its popularity grew, America’s youth got caught up in the game and were interested in the lives of its ballplayers. Baseball players, who after all were entertainers, enjoyed popularity like movie stars. The game itself became like U.S. Steel -- and those whose living was the game decided that the company line was the best policy.
The myth preserved for many decades, despites the efforts of such visionaries as Battlin’ Billy Martin in the '50s to strike a blow (pun intended) for rebellious individualism and a reflection of society’s problems. We’ve known (via full disclosure in hard news stories with full national coverage) for about a decade now that our professional athletes are human beings -- not characters out of a Clair Bee novel. This has been a decade of drug rehab and trials, bad press relations, strikes, violent on- and off-field brawls, collusion and ungraceful falls by great stars of the past.
Boggs, Garvey and Rose -- all seemed to relish the image of role model. Try to think of three players that more epitomized the image of baseball. Wade, the hitting machine with his batting titles and array of good copy superstitions; Steve, the all-American boy, marathon autograph signer, and future senator, whose 1984 playoff homer still recalls chills in San Diegans; and Pete, the dusty-faced legend, ballplayer’s ballplayer, Charlie Hustle, the game’s all-time hits leader.
The common denominator here is arrogance -- a trait that’s not inbred, but acquired after years of special treatment. These incidents might be mere titillation if not for Boggs’ sanctimonious rationalizing, Garvey’s smug Eddie Haskell position, and Rose’s bold lying.
In Boggs’ defense, Margo Adams does conduct himself like a whore and capitalist, and as her shoplifting charge shows, she’s none too stable. But the mental picture of of Wade jumping up from the couch during Geraldo, slapping his forehead with a sense of relief and self-realization and crying “Addiction to sex, yeah, that’s the ticket,” is laughable. He also seemed to bask in his appearance with another of his icons, Barbara Walters. He managed some convincing tears as he reflected on how lucky he was that his wife Debbie didn’t send him packing when word of his indiscretions were to become public record. Does anybody think he would have confessed if Margo Adams has just clammed up and offered to go off to Nordstrom’s -- never to be heard from again?
The expression on Steve Garvey’s face as Marty Levin of Channel 39 news interviewed him about his off-the-field interests was a familiar one. It was identical to the one he used in countless interviews over the years to explain how he hit that home run or ho he won that MVP award, or how he might run for Senate someday, or how he would like to run the Padres. He was juggling more dates than Tony Curtis in “Boeing Boeing,” yet he failed to pick up one of the “Responsibilities in Birth Control” pamphlets anyone can find in the back of the church. His term for the handling of his problems was “damage control.” If this scandal ever dies down, Steve Garvey does have a future in politics. He’s already proven he’s a player in a league with Gary Hart and John Tower.
The saddest case is that of Pete Rose, the one with the most to lose and the least perspective on baseball’s priority in one’s life. In one interview, he attempted to make the point that because he was Pete Rose and the Reds play in a stadium located on Pete Rose Way, an investigation into his activities was unfair and unthinkable – that the institution of Pete Rose was somehow beyond the legal restrictions of regular citizens. This friend to touts and bookies can rattle of every scratch single and the date on which he hit it, yet he didn’t read the section in baseball’s rule book that prohibits gambling and unsavory associations.
Hell, Pete Rose is right. He is the game -- and he’s facing a year’s suspension.
The era of the role model is decidedly over. It’s almost 1990, and baseball has returned to a new turn of the century -- with a cast of colorful characters like Swinger Boggs, Stevie Two-Face, and Charlie the Hustler.